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Monday, 22 August 2011

Differences between UK and SA

It doesn't look like anything has changed in the UK since I left in January, but my trip back last week did highlight the differences and all of them were negative...OK so I arrived back to the riots, seriously nothing to do with me.

I'll start with the media...all doom and gloom, newspapers and the TV describing Broken Britian,almost condoning the riots and the looting, with their explanations and reasons as to why these people were behaving the way they did...they have nothing...yeah so what...come to South Africva and see what NOTHING really looks like and the vast differences between rich and poor..you see here in South Africa if you don't have a job, you don't have money, therefore you don't have a house to sit in and watch SKY TV all day, complaining how the government and education system have failed you and absolutly no benefits...

People...How rude? and as for queing, the English say they're good at it...no they ain't..they're good at moaning about it, complaining if you're taking too long or if someone dares to push in...kids screachingin the supermarkets, parents ignoring them or screeching back, snide looks and heavy tutting, no patience, no waiting...here you have to queue for everything, for hours, only to be told to come back another day...very few tempers flare up.

Everyone in the UK feels they have a right to comment on everything, yet do nothing about it...mutter under their breath, snort and tut heavily but that's it...no offers of help when struggling with 3 cases, 2 hand luggage and a child with his arm in a cast, the bus driver and the passengers tutting as I try to get on the bus...I'm more than capable of lifting and moving the said luggage, just not in one bloody go.

South Africa is aclean place, I didn't realise how clean till I went back to the UK. I even tweeted Tesco with a picture of the mess outside the front of their store in Newport, all the public toilets weren't clean.

Everyone moans about the state of the roads in SA, the pot holes in particular, but the UK was just as bad, if not worse...the major roads in SA are 4-6 lanes, they resurface them regulary, they don't shut the whole road down and take several months, they resurface lane 2, you still drive on lanes 1, 3 and 4.

I don't know who it was but somesome said the 'whites in the UK were behaving like the blacks'..try being Black here...mind you if you're white it's just as hard...yes there are violent crimes, hijacking, armed robbery, but you don't see fights in the streets, drunken behaviour, people don't swear at you if you accidentially bump into them, kids don't hang round street corners scaring people and preventing them from walking past, the streets aren't full of litter, the toilets are always clean.

Racism is still an issue here, but there isn't an obvious class system, you're either black, white, rich or poor.